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  • You’re a Handsome Devil, What’s Your Name?
  • Ted McLoof (bio)

The woman across the street from Alex’s mother’s house wears curlers in her hair as she hangs billowy pale-blue sheets from a clothesline in her yard. It’s five o’clock and Alex wonders why she’s still got curlers in, until he remembers that, growing up across the street from this woman, she always seemed to have curlers in her hair, like a sitcom neighbor, rolling pin in hand. Wind beats hell from the sheets and she gets hit in the face, loses her balance. He nearly gets up to help her but thinks back on the time she stole their cat, and on the time she called the cops on him for drinking on his own front lawn, and on the time she gypped him on the paint job he’d done on her house, which is why her fence is still corroded and splintering flakes of off-white.

He sits on the late-afternoon, March-damp curb, runs his fingers through the loose pebbles and the mud. Yellow lights glow from the patio behind him and there are two cars in the driveway, one of which belongs to his brother: a white, sporty new Audi, glistening in the aftermath of the rain and the shine of the streetlights. He wonders where the other cars are and guesses that his other two brothers haven’t shown up yet — they are notorious for being late. Alex notices that there still is no license plate on Billy’s Audi, just a piece of paper from the dealership in the front window. The car and the house don’t match, Alex thinks. It’s like a homeless guy wearing a tuxedo, like a twelve-year-old smoking a cigar. It is like a Baked Alaska, a dessert Alex has heard about from his brothers but never tasted himself. The house is as it always was: peeling paint, a rusted fence, a broken window on the second floor, where Alex’s room used to be. When he looks at the broken window, a stripped-down box of Cap’n Crunch duct-taped to the inside of the jagged edges, he feels a pang of the pain in his fist and looks at the scar down his ring finger where the shard of glass had cut.

On a nice night like this, he knows, Mom and The Pricks will be sitting on the back porch, no one inside that can see him out front, so he takes out his pack of Virginia Slims and lights one with a match. The pack of matches has the Dickens insignia on the front, in a font, the lower stem of the D underlining the rest of the word, that makes it look like “Pickens.” “Pickens are slim,” Dean had said [End Page 49] to him, glancing around at the clientele when they first met — Dean had sidled up to him. In bed, later that night, that was the exact word he’d used, sidled.

“Pickin’s were slim,” Alex told him, and plucked a long, scraggly stray hair off of Dean’s chin. “Why do you think I bothered with your scrawny ass?”

Dean took the hair from between Alex’s fingers. “’Cause it’s the only bar for miles and you got lucky.” Then he blew the hair away like an eyelash and said, “And anyway, by the time I show up, everyone there’s too drunk to care.” Which was so true that Alex wondered, briefly, if he could pull that trick on Mom and The Pricks, get them nice and toasted and then get Dean to sidle in through the side door.

Alex has never smoked on this lawn before, even in high school when he lived here. He takes a drag and when he blows it out, he notices how the cool blue lights make the smoke look ghostly, like something out of a shitty horror film or a fog machine from a community stage production of A Christmas Carol. He concentrates on it because he doesn’t want to concentrate on the dinner he’s about...

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